The Deepest Shade of Green

By Jack M. Germain
Mar 23, 2009 6:00 AM PT

Talk is cheap when it comes to going green. It's one thing for IT
managers to remind a company's workers to throttle back on wasteful
energy use now and then and recycle old equipment effectively; it's quite another
to implement real energy-saving procedures. More times than not,
companies do more talking about being green than actually working to greenify their
operations.

Running a deeply efficient and non-wasteful IT operation is much more complex than
simply being "green" or "not green." It's all a matter of degree.
What's more important for managers to ask is how deeply green can
they get. In today's sour economy, motivations for going deep green
have changed drastically.

Becoming a more ecologically minded enterprise will
be an operational imperative to bring an organization with data center
activity or numerous banks of servers considerable savings. Greening
up, while helping the environment, is more a way of helping the bottom
line.

"Companies are finding that efficiently managing data is making a huge
impact on the amount of energy they are saving," Mike Logan, president
of Axis Technology, told TechNewsWorld.

Patience Pays

The trick to maximizing the greenery comes from deleting excessive
consumption. Over time, the cost keeps adding on, Logan said.

He sees a lot of companies discussing how to become less wasteful. Ultimately, however, the operations folks get involved and try to combine the
concept of getting greener with a way to speed up a return on
investment for upgrading equipment.

Typically, operations managers push for a better ROI in six months to
one year. They assume that by consolidating through technology such as
virtualization, the savings will speed along.

"Six months to one year is unrealistic in most cases. They find out
that what they were doing may not have been so inefficient," he said.

Dance a Two-Step

The starting point in becoming greener, according to Logan, is
cleaning up an inefficient array of hardware. That process involves
consolidating equipment so power-consuming computers and servers are
not ineptly idling when they are not needed.

Reducing hardware to run what consumes power more efficiently is the
first part of the process. The second step is to upgrade in order to
achieve greater efficiency and reduce consumption.

"The goal of going green is still an achievable goal for both cost
savings and an overall change in how data centers are architected,"
Alan Murphy, a technical marketing manager with F5 Networks, told
TechNewsWorld.

Balancing Act

Reducing the number of physical servers is the primary method for
ging greener, especially in the data center. That one change
results in less raw power consumption to both power the servers and
the equipment that keeps them cool.

The key is reducing idle time as well as network switches and
routers drawing power to feed those idle servers. Implementing virtualization is one key to making that happen,
according to Murphy.

The typical path: Virtual platforms and virtual servers
from companies such as VMware and Microsoft. The challenge with
virtualizing, howver, is that it becomes a numbers game.

Shades of Green

For instance, more virtual servers typically mean a one-to-one
reduction of physical servers in the data center. Yet more physical
servers are often needed to host all of these new virtual servers.
Upgrading to larger servers requires more power and typically uses
about the same number of network ports, noted Murphy.

"Many virtual servers won't save money and consume less resources by
reducing the amount of electrical draw and cooling. However, the
degree and balance of this savings verses the implementation costs
before and after need to be weighed before a massive green initiative
is undertaken, Murphy said.

In other words, the key to a successful green migration is how the
virtual platforms and virtual machines are utilized. This is where the
intelligent provisioning of services comes into play.

Control the Throttle

When it comes to planning a greener IT environment, the data center
manager should function as the power miser. If the combination of
virtual platform and virtual machine is implemented in a just-enough
manner, the data center manager can closely couple application need
with power and cooling consumption. The application need translates
into a specific number of virtual servers.

"During light periods, such as the middle of the night for a CRM
application, those virtual servers can be deprovisioned and not use
any power or cooling resources. As needs increase during business
hours, the virtual servers hosting that CRM application can be
provisioned incrementally to address just enough application need, and
thus drawing just enough power and cooling from the data center to
feed those critical virtual machines and the application," explained
Murphy.

Products for Greening

New pressures to save costs and reduce energy requirements are pushing
IT organizations to find products to get greener. Products such as
VMware's vMotion and vCenter are available for provisioning virtual
servers. Application delivery virtualization and real-time application
service provisioning can be managed with products such as F5's Big-IP
Local Traffic Manager, suggested Murphy.

Together, tools like these allow services in the data center to be spun
up and down as need dictates, drawing only the exact amount of power
and cooling to help achieve a green data center. Other tools for
greening up IT environments are based on best practices to reduce
energy requirements and drive efficiencies.

Five steps will help IT managers prune their green operations, offered
Jose Iglesias, who heads Symantec's overall strategy for helping
customers achieve more green IT environments.

Upgrade hardware and data center design.

Consolidate servers.

Prioritize storage use.

Implement data deduplication.

Deploy power management tools.

Another approach to a deeper shade of green is based on the simple
premise that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. To help
companies figure out what is consuming energy at the
device level and how much, Raritan Power IQ Energy Management
software provides real-time power information on each
server.

The Axis Technology DMsuite is a data masking tool that profiles,
masks, audits and manages data in a standardized, automated manner. It
helps companies cut down on the amount of electricity and equipment
necessary for data centers by consolidating data as it protects it,
according to Logan.